David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“And there were lots of other things, but there’s one thing I really have to tell you, which happened to us with Adam and with Ofer. Just tell me when you get tired.”

“Tired?” He laughs. “I’ve slept enough.”

“We had this episode, just before Adam’s bar mitzvah, something I still can’t really explain.”

The dog turns around and grunts, her fur stranding on end. Ora and Avram quickly look back, and Ora has time to think: It’s him , the notebook man, he’s chasing me. But a few yards away, near a raspberry bush, stand two heavy, bloated wild boars, watching them with beady eyes. The bitch howls, lowers her body to the ground, and takes a step back, almost touching Ora’s leg. The boars sniff and flare their nostrils. For a moment or two there is no movement. A songbird on a nearby tree screeches. Ora feels her body respond to the wildness in the boars. Her skin quivers, and whatever flows through her is sharper and more animalistic than what she had felt when the dogs attacked them. Suddenly the boars take off, grunt angrily, and run away with victorious glee, their thick bodies dancing lightly.

“Did you notice his twitches?” Ilan had asked one night in bed.

“Adam’s? With his mouth?” She murmured and nestled her head in the round of his shoulder. (Later, when she fell asleep, Ilan would gently turn her over and snuggle against her back; every night she sleepily returned to the sweet journey, in her father’s arms, from the living room couch to her bed.)

“And did you see the way he touches his fingertip to the spot between his eyes?”

She opened her eyes. “Now that you mention it.”

“Should we ask him? Say something?”

“No, no, let’s not. What good would it do?”

“Yeah, it’ll pass. I’m sure it will.”

Two days later she noticed that Adam was breathing into his cupped hand every few minutes, like someone smelling his breath. He turned around and let out quick, short exhalations, as though trying to banish an invisible creature. She decided not to tell Ilan, for the time being. Why worry him needlessly? The whole thing would pass in a few days anyway. But the next day there was more: every time Adam touched an object, he blew on his fingertips, and then on his arms, up to the elbows. He rounded his lips like a fish before he said anything. She started to find his overflowing creativity a little worrying and was reminded of something her mother used to say: There’s no end to trouble’s ideas. Finally, after he got up from lunch three times with various excuses, sneaked into the bathroom, and came back with wet hands, she phoned Ilan at the office and described the latest symptoms. Ilan listened quietly. “If we make a big deal out of it,” he eventually said, “it’ll only make it worse. Let’s just try to ignore it, and you’ll see, he’ll calm down.” She had known this was what he would say. That was exactly why she had called him.

The next day she found that if Adam happened to touch any part of his body, he quickly blew on it. The new rule, which he apparently had to obey categorically, was rapidly turning him into a tight knot of gestures and counter-gestures, which he tried very hard to hide, but Ora saw. And Ilan saw.

Strange, thinks Avram, why didn’t they take him to see someone?

“Maybe we should take him to someone,” she told Ilan at night, in bed.

“Who?” Ilan asked tensely.

“I don’t know. Someone. A professional, to have a look.”

“A psychologist?”

“Maybe. Just to have a glance.”

“No, no, it’ll only make it worse. It will be like we’re telling him he’s—”

“What?”

“Not right.”

But he isn’t, she thought.

“Let’s wait a bit. Give him some time.”

She tried to nestle into his shoulder, but her head could not find its place. She felt hot and sweaty. There was no peace in her body, or in his. For some reason she remembered something Avram had once said: if you look at someone for a long time, at anyone, you can see the most terrible place they might reach in their lifetime. She didn’t sleep that night.

The next weekend they went to the beach at Beit Yannai. From the moment they arrived, Adam was constantly busy cleaning. He washed his hands over and over again and scrubbed his inflatable beach mattress with damp cloths. He even turned it over every few minutes to clean “the bit that touched the sea.”

At sunset, Ora and Ilan sat in deck chairs, Ofer played and dug in the sand, and Adam stood waist-high in the water, turning in circles, blowing in every direction, touching every joint and knuckle in his hands and feet. A tall, tan elderly couple walked arm in arm on the beach and stopped to look at Adam. From a distance, with the sunset’s blush on his back, he looked enmeshed in a poetic fairy dance, one movement following the other, each born from its predecessor.

“They think it’s Tai Chi,” Ilan hissed, and Ora whispered that it was starting to drive her mad. He put a hand on her arm. “Wait. He’ll get sick of it. How long can he keep this up?”

“Look at how totally indifferent he is to people watching him.”

“Yes, that’s what worries me a little.”

“A little? Adam? In front of everyone?”

She thought about Ilan’s father, who during his final days in the hospital had lost all shame and would undress in front of everyone to show yet another place on his body where the growth had spread.

“And look how Ofer keeps peeking at him, all the time,” Ilan said.

“Think about what it must do to him, to see Adam like that.”

“Has he talked to you about it?”

“Ofer? Nothing. I tried to ask him this morning, when we were alone on the beach. Nothing.” She forced a smile. “Well, he’s not going to collaborate against Adam.”

Adam kissed his fingertips and showered light touches on his waist, thighs, knees, and ankles in the water. He straightened up, spun around in a circle, and blew in all four directions.

“What’s going to happen when school starts in September, I want to know.”

“Wait. There are almost two months to go. It’ll pass by then.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“It will, it will.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“How could it not?”

Now she pulls her knees in to her chest, holds her breath, and looks at Avram for a long time. Avram feels that he can’t sit still for much longer. Ants are crawling all through his body.

Adam seemed to grow more distant day by day. Bad thoughts congregated, and Ora sensed that they had been lying in wait for some time. During the day they hovered like shadows in her head. At night, she sleepily banished them until she was exhausted, and then they descended. Ilan woke her and caressed her face and held her close to him and told her to breathe with him, slowly, until she calmed down.

“I had a nightmare,” she said. Her face was buried in his chest. She would not let him turn on the light, afraid he might read in her eyes what she had seen: Avram walked past her on the street, dressed in white and looking very pale, and when he came close he murmured that she should buy the newspaper today. She tried to stop him, to ask how he was and why he insisted on being estranged from her, but he pulled his arm away from her grip in disgust and left. The newspaper headline said that Avram was planning to go on a hunger strike outside her house until she gave in and delivered one of her sons to him.

Adam needed new gym shoes for the school year, and she kept putting off the shopping expedition. He asked her repeatedly to take him to the mall so he could choose a gift for Ofer, and while only two weeks earlier she would have been filled with excitement by such a request—“And after we finish shopping, can I take you out to a café?”—she now avoided him with such feeble excuses that he seemed to understand, and he stopped asking.